As the resident historian around these parts, I'll be doing the decade retrospectives for the next month or so. We'll go year-by-year soon, but for now, we're looking at people and concepts who had a bad decade.

By a bad decade, we're not talking about fads that inevitably evaporated. (No Elian Gonzalez, or "Livin' La Vida Loca.") We mean people and concepts that, on December 31, 1999, were respected and/or revered, reputations that were devastated by the last 10 years. If this decade would have never happened, they would have been a lot better off. The last decade exposed them as not nearly as lasting as we once thought they would be.